He closed his mouth firmly against any premature licking of his lips; but there had come an excited note into his voice which it was impossible to miss, though he answered quietly enough.
“There are times in life, little lady,” he said, “when we can only listen to the ticking of the clock of fate and wait for what is destined to happen. This is one of those times.”
XXI THE PENANCE
“But haven’t you the power to see,” young John was saying to his elder brother, his voice mounting up almost to a shout, “that the church has just created this whole business of the Trinity in order to catch the three in its fishing-net?”
“What three classes,” enquired Tilton, “have you got in your head?”
“In my head — nothing!” cried the other indignantly, “the classes I’m talking about are with us always. They are here in the Fortress! They are there in the Priory! They are everywhere. I am talking about first, stupid, simple, ordinary people: second, artistic, imaginative people: third, strong ambitious people. This third class is of course the class who govern and rule us — not always on thrones or on horseback, or in chariots — very often entirely behind the scenes.
“By the idea of God the Father they catch the strong rulers who imprison and execute their enemies. By the ideas of God the Son they catch the simple, stupid mass of ordinary people who aren’t tricky or clever enough to be anything but good and obedient, and who make of what they call Love a mystical and magical power that works miracles.
“And finally by the idea of the Holy Ghost they catch the poets, the story-tellers, the musicians, the painters, the builders and the scholars; and these are the ones who have invented Our Lady, and made Her the Mother of God, and the Fourth great Panel of the Pythagorean square!”
“I’ve heard enough of your fancies and theories, John,” retorted his brother. “For heaven’s sake let’s take advantage of having the whole day to ourselves, while Mother and Father are both taken up with listening to this Dominican from Germany refuting this Franciscan from Italy.”
John decided at this point that he must be more practical in talking to Tilton.
“Presently,” he remarked, “they’ll be having — father and mother I mean — a nice tricky job if these King’s Men from London demand shelter for the night. I can’t make out what the idea was in sending them down here at all. I don’t believe the old King had anything to do with it. I fancy there’s some ‘funny business’, as we say in Oxford, going on in the King’s court. What we want is Lord Edward back again! Why does he go on with this ridiculous crusade? What’s this city of Acre, to him, or him to it, that he should fight for it? What I think about this whole affair is—”
“Please, John, don’t go on any more like this! And look there—Isn’t that our Peleg? Who on earth are those two with him? Why — John! If that’s not Lilith of Lost Towers! Who’s that man with her? He’s a foreigner of some sort. He doesn’t look as if he knew his head from his tail. He’s mad or something! There! He’s seen us now. What the devil is he up to? He’s moving about watching us with his hands pressed between his legs as if he were turning himself into a flying battering-ram.”
“Never mind him, Tilton. He’s nothing to us. The person for us to watch is that devilish girl! God in Heaven, but she’s a beauty! I’d like to — Listen, Tilton, why shouldn’t we get hold of her? Let’s carry her back to the Fortress as a prisoner-of-war!”
“John, John, what’s come over you? What’s the matter with you? You’re looking at me as if you’d like to knock my head off. What have I done to make you so angry? Do you think I want to start fighting as to which of us should have that girl? Heaven help you John! You’re getting queer. It’s that confounded Brazen Head that’s the trouble. Ever since that blasted thing came into the armoury you’ve been behaving more and more queerly. Didn’t I hear you the other day tell mother that you’d like to go and visit Iscalis — or what do they teach us to call that village now — Ilchester! And why? I know the damned place. There’s nothing there but a river, and a few houses by a bridge, and a lot of marshy fields! You think it’s wonderful because your precious Friar’s uncle or brother or somebody lives there. I tell you it’s not half as exciting as Montacute, where at least there’s a high pointed hill, or as Glastonbury, where King Arthur’s grave is!”
“If you don’t stop talking such nonsense, Tilton, I’ll give you such a rap over your dull, stupid, traditional, commonplace, church-building skull that you won’t be able to sleep for—”
“Stop that, you two fools!”
The sudden appearance of the utterer of these surprising words was as much of a shock to the two brothers as it was to Lilith and Maitre Pierre de Maricourt. Peleg was less startled because he had been for some while able, from the watch-tower of his own height, to detect some creature’s secretive movements from alder-bush to alder-bush, scrub-oak to scrub-oak, weeping-willow to weeping-willow; but he hadn’t imagined for a minute that a warrior in the rather extravagant accoutrements of a captain from the Royal Guard should be following these tactics.
But so it was. The intruder, who had interrupted not only this old familiar quarrel between the brothers that was being so craftily fomented by Master Peter and his pet lodestone, but who also had diverted from their aim that traveller’s further plans, turned out to be none other than Perspicax himself, captain of these King’s Men who had just arrived, and a cousin of Friar Bacon and like him a native of Ilchester.
By this time Perspicax, through his social skill in the delicate art of handling superiors and his formidable gift for inspiring respect in inferiors, had become one of the most active and important military officers that the old king possessed.
Having heard of the disturbances stirred up by Bonaventura and of the local war — for it had by now become more than a feud — between the Manor of Roque and the Barony of Lost Towers, Perspicax had persuaded the already dying Henry to let him come down to the Wessex Coast with a quite large squadron of King’s Men.
With a few decisive explanations and a moderate use of his enormous powers of persuasion and domination, Perspicax soon had all the five of them, the two young men, equally with Peleg and Lilith and Master Peter of Picardy, under his personal control.
He led them all straight back to the Fortress, and he found no difficulty in arranging with the door-keeper, or rather with the door-keeper’s competent dame, exactly just where and how the whole lot of his men had best encamp that night, and what special additions to their already substantial supply of food and drink they might expect to receive. He then found no difficulty at all in smoothing the way with Lady Val and the Baron, not only for the reception of Peter Peregrinus, but even — and this made everybody in the Fortress exchange puzzled and excited comments — for the conferring of a solitary night’s rest in a suitable chamber upon Lilith of Lost Towers.
Once safely alone in a small room at the back of the Fortress, a room which their nurse, in that instinctive forestalling of awkward situations which had made her what she was to all of them, had reserved as a sort of retiring-place for herself, our lonely traveller, whose magnetic power had led him to regard himself as Antichrist, decided that it would be silly to play any of his tricks with “Little Pretty” while he was only half-alive by reason of an overpowering need for sleep.